So apparently my brain is just guessing everything?? What does that even mean for free will

[lunar_wolf]

Okay so I just finished reading about predictive processing theory and I'm kind of freaking out ngl.

The basic idea from Karl Friston is that your brain isn't passively taking in information from the world and then deciding what to do. It's constantly running simulations of what it EXPECTS to happen, and then only paying attention to the errors between prediction and reality. You're not perceiving the world as it is. You're perceiving your best guess of it.

Which honestly? That hit me weird because it sounds suspiciously like how I already think about divination.

Like, when I pull The Fool from my deck, I don't think the card is magically transmitting objective truth into my skull. I think it's a pattern that my brain uses to reduce uncertainty — it gives me a framework to make sense of a messy situation. The meaning isn't IN the card. My brain is projecting it, using the symbol as a scaffolding. That's... basically predictive processing with extra steps?

And here's where it gets weird for me spiritually. If my brain is just constantly generating predictions and updating based on error, then what the hell is "intuition"? Is that feeling I get during the dark moon just my prediction engine running with less sensory input to correct it? That would actually explain why I do my best readings when I'm sleep deprived or in that liminal half-awake state. Less prediction error correction = more room for the subconscious models to bubble up.

But the free will thing is what's really messing with me. If my "decisions" are just my brain's best prediction of what action will minimize future error, then am I choosing anything? Or am I just along for the ride?

I don't think this kills spirituality though. Honestly it might make it more interesting. If consciousness is mostly prediction, then ritual and meditation and scrying aren't about accessing some external truth — they're about HACKING your own prediction machinery. Changing the priors. Rewiring what your brain expects to see.

But I'm still wrestling with it. Anyone else thought about this stuff? Does it change how you approach your practice or does it not matter?

[mike_b_7732]

If my brain is just constantly generating predictions and updating based on error, then what the hell is "intuition"?

I think you're doing the same thing you did with your ex's texts — building an elaborate framework around something that might just be pattern recognition running with incomplete data. Calling it "hacking your prediction machinery" assumes you understand the machinery well enough to hack it, and I'm not sure Friston's model gives you that.

[slanted_robin_838]

Less prediction error correction = more room for the subconscious models to bubble up.

Or that's just degraded perception you're romanticizing — I've had those "insights" while sleep deprived too, and most of them didn't hold up the next morning.

[purple_elliptical]

Okay but here's the thing that's been bugging me about this whole framing, and I say this as someone who stares at price charts for 8 hours a day looking for patterns that "aren't really there" according to most people.

"If my brain is just constantly generating predictions and updating based on error, then what the hell is 'intuition'?"

I think you're too quick to lump intuition into the prediction engine bucket. Last March I was trading SOL and I had this moment — completely sober, fully rested, mid-day — where I just KNEW to exit a position. No signal, no pattern I could articulate, nothing in my model. I closed it and it dumped 12% in the next hour. When I tried to reconstruct my reasoning afterward, I couldn't. There was no "prior" I could point to. It felt like information came FROM somewhere, not that my brain generated it internally.

And that's where Friston's framework breaks down for me. It assumes all the information your brain works with is either already encoded in your priors OR comes through sensory error correction. But what if some information arrives through channels the framework doesn't account for? I don't think that's woo — I think it's an honest gap in the model. The free energy principle is elegant but it's still just a model, and it has edges.

The ritual-as-hacking-priors angle is solid though. I've been experimenting with doing a quick tarot pull before my morning market analysis specifically to SET certain expectations, not to "read" the future. Like, pulling The Tower before a volatile day doesn't predict a crash — it primes me to see risk I might otherwise filter out. That's literally just adjusting my prediction weights. But I don't think that explains away the moments where something arrives that I genuinely had no prior for.

Free will question though — yeah that one I've given up on. Whether I'm "choosing" a trade or my prediction engine minimized its way there, the outcome is identical. Not sure it matters.